Читать книгу The Killing Circle - Andrew Pyper - Страница 9

Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.

As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.

Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.

"Dad? Can I watch TV?"

"Ten minutes."

Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.

A missing person story. The victim (is one a "victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers "acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner". While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that "activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future".

It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.

"What are you doing, Daddy?"

Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living room’s sliding door.

"I’m locking the door."

"But we never lock that door."

"We don’t?"

I peer through the glass at our snow-covered garden. Checking for footprints.

"Show’s over,” Sam says, pulling on my pant leg and pointing at the TV.

"Ten more minutes."

As Sam runs off, I pull the dictaphone out of my pocket.

"Note to self,” I whisper. "Buy padlock for back gate."

It’s the weekend already, and Tuesday’s deadline requiring a page from my nonexistent workin-progress is fast approaching. I’ve made a couple stabs at something during the week, but the surroundings of either the Crypt at home or the cubicle at work have spooked any inspiration that might be waiting to show itself. I need to find the right space. A laptop of one’s own.

Once Tamara’s out-of-town sister, Stacey, has come by to take Sam and his cousins to see the dinosaurs at the museum, I hit the Starbucks around the corner. It’s a sunny Saturday, which means that, after noon, Queen Street will be clogged with shoppers and gawkers. But it’s only just turned ten, and the line-up isn’t yet out the door. I secure a table, pop the lid on my computer, and stare at a freshly created word-processing file. Except for the blinking cursor, a virgin screen of grey. Its purity stops me from touching the keys. The idea of typing a word on to it seems as crude as stepping outside and pissing into a snowbank. And the dentist office grind of the cappuccino machine is starting to get on my nerves. Not to mention the orders shouted back and forth between the barista kids behind the counter. Who wouldn’t raise their head to see what sort of person orders a venti decaf cap with half skim, half soy and extra whipped cream?

I pack up and walk crosstown to the Reference Library on Yonge. The main floor entrance is crowded, as it always is, with the homeless, the new-in-town, the dwindling souls without a cellphone who need to make a call. Through the turnstiles, the building opens into an atrium that cuts through the five floors above. I choose the least occupied level and find a long work table all to myself. Lean back, and think of a single word that might stride forth to lead others into battle.

Nothing.

All around me are tens of thousands of volumes, each containing tens of thousands of printed words, and not one of them is prepared to come forward when I need it most.

Why?

The thing is, I know why.

I don’t have a story to tell.

But Conrad White did, once upon a time. Seeing as I’m in the Reference Library, I decide to take a break and do a bit of research. On Mr White, ringleader of the Kensington Circle.

It takes a little digging, but some of the memoirs and cultural histories from the time of sixties Toronto make footnoted mention of him. From old money, privately schooled, and author of a debatably promising novel before going into hiding overseas. As one commentator tartly put it, "Mr White, for those who know his name at all, is more likely remembered for his leaving his homeland than any work he published while living here."

What’s intriguing about the incomplete biography of Conrad White are the hints at darker corners. The conventional take has it that he left because of the critical reception given his book, Jarvis and Wellesley, the fractured, interior monologue of a man walking the streets of the city on a quest to find a prostitute who most closely resembles his daughter, recently killed in a car accident. An idealized figure he calls the "perfect girl". To anyone’s knowledge, Conrad White hasn’t written anything since.

But it’s the echoes of the author’s actual life to be found in the storyline of Jarvis and Wellesley that gives bite to his bio. He had lost a daughter, his only child, in the year prior to his embarking on the novel. And there is mention of White’s exile being precipitated by his relationship with a very real teenage girl, and the resulting threats of legal action, both civil and criminal. A literary recluse on the one hand, girl-chasing perv on the other. Thomas Pynchon meets Humbert Humbert.

I go back to my table to find my laptop screen has fallen asleep. It knows as well as I do that there will be no writing today. But that needn’t mean there can’t be reading.

The edition of Jarvis and Wellesley I pull off the shelf hasn’t been signed out in over four years. Its spine creaks when I open it. The pages crisp as potato chips.

Two hours later, I return it to where I found it.

The prose ahead of its time, no doubt. Some explicit sex scenes involving the older protagonist and young streetwalkers lend a certain smutty energy to the proceedings, if only passingly. And throughout, the unspoken grief is palpable, an account of loss made all the more powerful by narrating its effects, not its cause.

But it’s the description of the protagonist’s "perfect girl” that leaves the biggest impression. The way she is conjured so vividly, but using little or no specific details. You know exactly what she looks like, how she behaves, how she feels, though she is nowhere to be found on the page.

What’s stranger still is the certainty that I will one day meet her myself.